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Overactive diald

Hello Jim,
I have been following Linux Gazette and your Answer Guy column for about
6 months now. You do a good job as far as I need (other people may need
more than I do).

Situation: I have a Linux PC (RedHat 5.2) running as a dial-on-demand
Internet Gateway using diald. It works great. I have Samba up and
running as well as named. I can connect to the internet from both my
Linux PC and Windows95 boxes. When the connection is down, and I attempt
to connect with ftp, ping, http or whatever,
diald correctly establishes the internet connection to my ISP.

Everything is hunky-dory except one annoyance: diald dials every hour
whether or not someone is attempting an internet connection. How do I
get this to stop?

Thanks,
Darren

You almost certainly have a cron script that is doing
this. Look at your /etc/crontab file to see what's
running at that time. Some fairly subtle things can
involve DNS/MX or other Internet services which are
dynamically bringing up your connection.

'diald' has features to filter out some sorts of traffic
from its consideration as "activity" for the line. Thus
it can be configured to ignore some sorts of packets.